MAM
Nidhi Maheshwari steps up as JioStar’s brand marketing director
MUMBAI: Nidhi Maheshwari has taken a new seat at the brand strategy table, announcing her move to director of brand marketing at JioStar. It marks another leap in a career built on launches, turnarounds and campaigns that often became the story themselves.
Her latest role follows a year at JioStar, where she steered brand strategy as senior brand manager for JioHotstar. She played a central part in the platform’s launch and shaped its nationwide visibility through tightly crafted campaigns across cricket, entertainment and regional content.
Before her Jio stint, Nidhi spent nearly four years at Disney plus Hotstar as senior marketing manager for Hotstar Specials. She guided some of the platform’s biggest titles, including The Night Manager, which hit exceptional awareness marks with leaner budgets and won Promax Asia Gold and Promax India honours. She also led the hit franchise Aashiqana from concept to three successful seasons and rolled out 360 campaigns for shows like Moving in with Malaika, Shoorveer and R R Rajamouli’s Baahubali animated series.
Her marketing playbook was shaped further at Lionsgate, where she launched the Lionsgate Play OTT app in India and drove growth through original shows and 360-degree campaigns.
Nidhi’s early years were equally eclectic, cutting across Parle Agro’s fizz portfolio, Lakme’s fashion and bridal verticals, ITC and London & Partners. Whether managing Bigg Boss integrations for Appy Fizz or scaling new salon formats at Lakme, she consistently turned brand mandates into sharp, high-impact execution.
With over a decade of hands-on brand building across entertainment, beauty and FMCG, Nidhi now steps into her JioStar role with a mix of polish and pace. For the brand world, it is one more chapter in a career that seems to thrive on bold briefs and even bolder outcomes.
MAM
Sameer Nair shares heartfelt note as he exits Applause Entertainment
After nine years building the streamer’s content engine, one of India’s best-known TV men is moving on
MUMBAI: Sameer Nair is out. The chief executive of Applause Entertainment, the content studio backed by Kumar Mangalam Birla’s media empire, has announced his departure after nearly nine years at the helm, closing the chapter on one of Indian entertainment’s more quietly consequential careers.
Nair, who built Applause from the ground up in its current avatar, oversaw a slate that spanned Indian originals and international adaptations, threading together a hub-and-spoke business model that partnered with streaming platforms, broadcasters and production houses alike. The results were uneven, as they always are in content, but the ambition was not.
In a post on LinkedIn, Nair was generous to his outgoing patron. He thanked Birla for being an “inspirational boss and a great patron of the arts,” and signed off with a cheerful “Au Revoir” and a promise to remain Applause’s biggest cheerleader. Whether that sentiment survives the next chapter remains to be seen.
No successor has been named. Applause Entertainment did not immediately comment.
Nair built the machine. Now someone else has to run it — and in a streaming market that is simultaneously consolidating and convulsing, that is no small ask.
